Pow! Smack! Oof!

Envision vicious combatants locked in a zero-sum game in which only a small number can survive and only one can triumph. Imagine the contestants scratching, clawing, and punching one another for any and every competitive advantage. “Omni contra omni” wrote Hobbs. “All against all.” No quarter asked or given. Winner take all and devil take the hindmost.

Is my topic this week mixed martial arts? Or am I writing about “The Hunger Games”? Am I describing your first marriage and subsequent litigious divorce?

Nah. Of course, I’m writing about admissions to competitive colleges.

On Sunday, you tell your children to love their neighbors. Every religious tradition has a similar version of Deuteronomy 19:18. But on Monday, our kids get a different message: “If you help your classmate study for her chemistry exam, she will get a better grade; she will be graduated closer to the top of the class; she will get the last scholarship; she will be the one to absorb the scarce resources. She will be admitted to a TOP COLLEGE. And you won’t!

To the contrary, if your child gives of herself and helps her neighbor study, your child will end up drinking wine in the gutter. If the paradigm is “there is only one cabbage and I want MY daughter to have that cabbage” then it could be argued that your daughter won’t have any cabbage.

But the counter intuitive and very good news is that in college admissions, there are more than enough metaphorical cabbages to go around. Indeed, some college cabbages aren’t even harvested and rot, uneaten.

The vast majority of colleges admit virtually every qualified applicant. The issue isn’t “Where can you get in?” but “What can you DO in the classroom once you are admitted?.” Your valedictorian president-of-the-school daughter with perfect SAT scores was denied at Princeton? Your valedictorian president-of-the-school daughter with perfect SAT scores has to go to Franklin and Marshall instead?

Oh, the horror!

Last I checked there were a great many successful, content professionals who had called Lancaster home for four years. If those students were competent IN the classroom at F & M, they did just fine subsequently.

It will come as no surprise that many of my clients applying to competitive colleges are writhing shells of stressed out, lonely kids for whom high school is a miserable series of solitary vigils and anxiety ridden evaluations. Are these wraiths reading and learning until the wee hours because the books and ideas are the most cogent in the history of civilization? Are they doing projects and writing papers because they are fascinated by Sophocles, Newton, Shakespeare, and Virginia Wolfe? Not so much. These automatons are learning for the sake of grades, grades and more grades. They are learning for the sake of class rank. They are learning for the sake of admissions to competitive colleges.

What’s the way to win this game? Is it possible to “stack the deck,” to ensure that your daughter wins and that everyone else’s daughter loses? Is there a “fix,” so that your valedictorian son with an 800 on his math SAT is admitted and everyone else’s valedictorian son with 800 on his math SAT is denied?

Nope.

Beyond a point, admissions to hyper competitive colleges is random. Arbitrary. A roll of the dice. Based on factors beyond the control of the student. Is a beautiful sunset better than a strawberry milkshake? Depends how thirsty you are. Is that tuba player from the small town in the Midwest “better” than that yearbook editor from that major metropolitan area? Unless you’re willing to move to Kenosha and hand your child a tuba, the answer may not matter.

The other possible solution to the issue of competitive college admissions is as straight forward as it is effective: Don’t buy a ticket for that train.

Rather than insisting your kids compete in a sick game where the best case scenario is that they crawl to the top over the lifeless bodies of their shattered fellow students, suggest instead that they learn to collaborate. Help them learn to cooperate, to give a classmate a hand.

Our world will be a better place and your children will benefit if you allow them to “do unto others” each and every day of the week. And because they are not only accomplished students but also good citizens, they’ll do even better–even if they happen to be denied at a “top” college.